There comes a point when you don't know whether you're in the new place, or it's just a false dawn, and any pleasure at things will be knocked out of you as the universe belittles your arrogance. I suppose that's why I haven't written anything for a while. I haven't been looking back, but enjoying the present and the new challenges it has been offering. But also I have to admit that having been through the ups, and the downs that have always followed, I am very nervous to admit that I'm enjoying life, just in case the pressures that are inevitably part of adult life increase, bumping me back into a holding pattern of pain and coping.
But heck, dear readers of the Blog, I shall take a risk and admit to friends virtual and real, that I'm feeling rather good. What has changed? I'm not particularly slim at the moment, I have no man prowling around making me feel quietly content inside, my job is so busy it's difficult to keep up with everything that's going on, my finances are the same as ever, just about put together and the Absent Father hasn't overcome his own ego and started making positive steps to reconnect with his children. I've had a birthday since I've last chatted to you all, so now the blog is about a single woman in her 50s trying make sense and find purpose. The frustrations and pains that have so haunted me in recent years are still very present but somehow my perception has changed.
I am also mindful about admitting such a mindset puts me at risk of the 'I told you so' brigade who have all asserted to me that 'time is the best healer', somehow implying that making such a fuss about my abandonment by the Absent Father as my father was dying was a bit undignified, and certainly I was rather over-egging the pudding. Some of these people are genuinely unkind, trying to undermine someone trying their best, bewildered and lost as purpose passes them by, but others are of a gentler disposition, steady and stable, and genuinely sorry for the tumult that seemed to overwhelm me. But should it matter to me what anyone else thinks?
Whether it should or not, I suppose the truth is that it has always mattered to me what other people think of me. I find it genuinely distressing that anyone should be dismissive and nasty about me, or to me. I am not the sort of person who can utter the phrase 'well it's their problem isn't it?' and genuinely, deep inside, mean it. Always I seem to want to take the blame for how people feel about me, as if somehow I should have tried harder, been kinder, more thoughtful. It is a ridiculous state of affairs, I can see that, an insecurity. It also explains how I felt towards the end of my marriage. I've written elsewhere of feeling invisible, that a woman with daughters reaching womanhood and clearly losing her first bloom of youth should do as village women of the Mediterranean countries used to, dress in black and sit at the back of the room. Combine a low sense of self worth, middle age and a husband who expected me to work on my own self esteem as a matter of course, and you have a disastrous cocktail brewing. Was what happened inevitable? Was there, in all honesty, anything I could have done?
Ah the 'beat yourself up' question. Except it isn't anymore. I am as I am. There are people out there who don't like me. It is their problem.
Yes, this is all powerful stuff, but why now, and will it last?
I went to my first every antiques auction viewing recently. When the Absent Father left he took very little, as predicted by my clever solicitor. There was I all prepared to be decent and fair and offer him half the contents, and I was told to wait. My solicitor suggested I ask the Absent Father what he would like from the house, because in the solicitor's experience men take very little and always forget the things of real value. He also told me if the AF turned out to be unusually greedy, then we could contest it. So I followed this sage advice, and sure enough the motoring books, two bookcases, one I never liked, half the CD collection, the small chest his grandmother gave him (and I had to remind it that was his) and four rather handsome carved dining chairs one of his relatives made were about the only things that left the house. Oh yes, and all the motoring pictures and posters. He had taken his motoring cups, a small selection of engraved tankards tracking his mediocre performance through minor races in the old car racing calendar, when he left on that final day. Filling our vast brown Ford Explorer with bag loads of clothes that filled so many cupboards and drawers he had little space for anything else, but he regarded his 'pots' as an essential part of his character. I remember I gave him a picture of each of his daughters, he would have left without them had I not insisted. I was told that he has no pictures of his daughters at the house where he lives, his Woman's house. I have no idea if that is still the case, but I know I put aside picture of DN1's graduation that he said he wanted, dated the envelope and put them away. He has yet to ask for them, and she graduated nearly two years ago.
So I was left with most of the contents of our marital home. There was a lot of stuff. We had a five bedroom, 3 reception room farmhouse, a barn which doubled as store room and his workshop for the vintage cars and bikes, stables, tack room, shed, greenhouse. Everything was full, every cupboard, every attic, every drawer. That was part of the problem, we were drowning in possessions. Chaos was overwhelming us, the job too big to even contemplate starting. Plus he never had time, he couldn't 'waste the day' when he wanted to be racing, to have fun since his work was so awful. He still has the same job, and isn't racing this year as the house he bought last year is still being worked on. He doesn't have a workshop, doesn't live in his own house. I wonder what happened to those chairs, are they still in storage?
Funny, I cried when they left. It seems strangely possessive to hold onto most things but cry when they went. But they were symbolic of the life we made together. He brought them into our first home. He wanted them from his childhood home for ours. Our first home was an end of terrace, Victorian house in Peckham. We should have bought a flat in Putney or Fulham, like everyone else, but the Absent Father wanted space for his motorbikes and he wanted a house. There never was space in the shed outside, and the house had most of it's original features removed, and Peckham frightened me at night. We made a lot of money in the mid 1980s doing it up and selling it 18 months later, moving out to our house before the last one. Timber framed, by the river, hopelessly impractical with garages that took many years to become a workshop that made him happy. We outgrew the house and he grew to hate to low ceilings upstairs, so we moved to the last house, with high ceilings and space for the horses I'd always dreamed of. The chairs came with us through all the moves. The table they sat around changed from a rectangular 4 legged solid affair his parents lent/gave us to the reproduction double pedestal I now loathe and want to replace. It was the same as the one our neighbours had, and I was much in awe of my neighbour and friend. She could garden and paint, she had loads of friends, held lots of jolly dinner parties. She was thin, had long hair, and was, I thought, very pretty. She was slightly older than me and quite grand in her ways. She had a private income from investments her father had made for her. Her children, a boy then a girl (the perfect combination my mother insisted when DN2 was born) were a little bit older than my two, and the girl played with DN1. I was flattered that she wanted to be my friend, charmed to be included on her guest list. Her husband worked locally, which seemed wonderful as the Absent Father was always troubled by the horrible journey to Town. Over time we had supper most friday nights together, at their house because our children slept soundly and theirs did not. My children were never a problem, hers were always more challenging. It didn't occur to me that my children were better behaved because we were a happier family, and I was a better mother. Lots didn't occur to me then.
I was working part time to make ends meet, and to try and justify my existence. She, of course, didn't need to work. At that time I taught evening classes as well as some daytime, as it was a good way of not leaving the children with a carer, and cutting down the costs. As they slept well I could pay a local girl to put them to bed and tidy round so the Absent Father didn't have to be back after his long, hard day in the City to care for his children. He also objected to coming home to a mess. It gave him an evening in the workshop to potter whilst I was out. The drive to Basildon was demanding, the drive home more so. Often I would turn the heater off and the keep the windows open to stay awake as I plodded up the A12 home. I rarely phoned home, I didn't need to, I understood the routine I had put in place to keep my household going. However I did try once, can't even remember why, but it was not out of suspicion I do remember that, but I got no reply. The following day I remember talking to the Absent Father on the phone he said he must have been in the workshop. I could sense he was lying, I can feel that emotion even now, the intuition tingling. It is one of my great regrets that I lost that intuition about him. In his last affair he lied to me so regularly, in what he said, what he did, and oddly most hurtful of all, what he wrote on the family calendar. I didn't pick it up, maybe we were lost already. But in those early days I did spot it, and in time it came out that he had been at my neighbour's house. I never asked him then if he was sleeping with her, didn't want to let the genie out of the bottle, but after sometime, and a particularly distressing 30th Birthday Party, the affair ended and we returned to each other.
The neighbours' marriage was in trouble, probably before we even moved to the village, but clearly she saw the Absent Father as her route out. Fortunately, or maybe not, he didn't. But divine intervention posted her husband to America for a year, and off they went. They came back separately I was told. I had very little to do with her after she snogged my husband in front of my guests at my 30th Birthday and I fled to the loo to cry. Next morning I went to tell her until she could behave with my husband I didn't want to be her friend, and the astounding thing is she didn't apologise, she acted as if somehow it was my fault.
The Absent Father and I never discussed what went on until nearly the end of our marriage. He lied to me. Then six months later when he'd left and come back, before he went for the last time, he admitted the sex. I had always felt he had slept with her, but didn't like to make a scene, you see, in some ways it had been my fault.
I've bought new chairs. Victorian, mahogany, balloon back chairs. I paid very little in the auction. I wasn't there, I was busy at work and left a bid. I've always loved balloon back chairs, prefer them to any other shape. The viewing at the auction house was exciting. So many other little bits and pieces that will fit my needs better than the things I've been left with, but nothing quite right yet. I'm looking for my round table, it may take many years, to find one that's right for me. But I know what I want and why. I'm not going to put up with anything less.
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